Cellular wireless communications systems are designed to serve many access terminals distributed in a large geographic area by dividing the area into cells. At the center of each cell, a radio node is located to serve access terminals (e.g., cellular telephones, laptops, PDAs) located in the cell. In some cases access terminals may route traffic from additional sources, for example a single access terminal on board an aircraft may relay data from other on-board devices to a radio node on the ground. Each cell is often further divided into sectors by using multiple sectorized antennas (the term “sector” is used both conventionally and in this document, however, even when there is only one sector per cell). In each cell, a radio node serves one or more sectors and communicates with multiple access terminals in its cell. A radio node can generally support a certain amount of traffic in each sector for a particular bandwidth, and this amount is reduced by the presence of other signals in the same frequency range or carrier. It is often desirable to monitor the level of interference in a sector in order to ensure that the interference is not overwhelming the traffic.